Date: January 4, 2010
To: letters@globeandmail.ca
From: Geoffrey Smith
Subject: The razor of paranoia

Mr. Yakabuski’s insightful essay misses two key points. First, where is Richard Nixon, the greatest exhibitor of the paranoid style of all? Second, historian Richard Hofstadter spoke from within the liberal consensus and found the paranoid style on the fringes. Here was a subtle way to use history and psychology to delegitimize the farther right and left. Ultimately, given the fate of the liberal consensus and the Democratic Party after 1972, as Mr. Yakabuski, notes, the joke was on the Democrats, and the paranoid style today stands revealed not only as the chief Republican weapon, but as much a feature of mainstream politics as of the so-called “lunatic fringe.” What liberal Democrats used against Joe McCarthy and the Republicans in the 1950s, the Republicans used against the Democrats in the 1970s and beyond.

Geoff Smith
Kingston